A Mental Game: Us versus Them and the Social Psychology of Fandom

Why, with intense and organic feelings of affiliation to our teams, does it so rarely seem to matter that the teams themselves are obviously artificial constructions? Why, in the midst of a fan revolt against an ownership group that is foreign and detached, do Manchester United fans not seem too bothered that most of their players are also ‘foreign’ (beyond Mancunians Gary Neville and Paul Scholes, United’s 18 on Saturday included 15 non-English players)? Why, amidst the admirable growth of genuine American supporters groups, do MLS teams not seem to put much emphasis on employing local players with roots in their communities? I’d like to suggest that the emotional intensity of fan affiliation, and the fact that it persists and even grows amidst the globalization and commercialization of the game, is less about our teams and more about our minds.

I’ve been intrigued by the noble irrationality of fan allegiance for years, with recent events in my small corner of the soccer world further piquing my curiosity—as a current Portlander who grew up in Seattle, the MLS-fed intensification of a lingering fan rivalry has been most curious to watch. The recent tenuous claim of ‘hooliganism’ when a Portland fan was apparently choked with his Timbers scarf by Seattle fans after a pre-season ‘friendly’ was only one marker in an ongoing Pacific Northwest rivalry.

Any American reader of soccer blogs that mention the Sounders or the Timbers is certainly familiar with the phenomenon—comment threads will inevitably end up with angry references to ‘S**ttle’ and ‘Portscum,’ often including exaggerated claims as to the differences between the cities. Likewise, at games themselves chants, songs, and signs regularly transition into personal attacks that are often demonstrably irrational. I was particularly struck at a US Open Cup match in Portland last year where a large double posted sign on parade in front of the sold-out crowd had a stark black and white illustration of a large rifle captioned with “KELLER—DO THE COBAIN.”

Really? Suggesting Kasey Keller should commit suicide because he had at that point played 12 games for the Sounders (about one tenth as many games as he has played for the United States—of which, despite occasional efforts to declare its own people’s republic, Portland is still a part)? What’s more, Kasey Keller has more connections to the city of Portland than any single player on the field for the Timbers that day. Keller was an all-American at the University of Portland, and is widely credited as the key player that allowed Clive Charles to make UP a legitimate soccer power—something the city’s soccer fans often note with pride. Keller even played 10 games for a previous incarnation of the Timbers in 1989. In contrast, the Timbers starting eleven that day had exactly zero players with any childhood or college roots in Portland—and at least one player on the roster who had not even heard of Portland Oregon until signing a contract.

Of course the vast majority fans, even in Portland and Seattle, don’t choke people with scarves or promote suicide—there are crazy people everywhere. And the edginess and intensity of passionate fan allegiance is often a crucial element of what makes a great match so much fun for everyone involved. But that doesn’t make our emotional allegiance to professional teams, which are mostly artificial ‘clubs’ oriented to making money for rich people, any more rational.

What does explain the engaging irrationality of the sports fan?

A few weeks ago I wrote about sports psychology, and the fact that in my experience it has proven less useful for enhancing performance than explaining how the game works. So this week I’m returning to that theme and suggesting that while many factors contribute to our emotional connections to sports teams, one of the best explanations comes from social psychology. (For an excellent alternative take in a more English football-centric direction see this recent essay by Fredorrarci.)

The basic idea, drawing off social identity theory, is that for various evolutionary reasons one of our most fundamental psychological instincts is to identify and divide the world into two groups: us and them. Us is good; them is bad. In our ancestral past this instinct may have been oriented by clans, but now it is up for grabs—we are constantly, unconsciously, affiliating with cities, countries, schools, political parties, genders, ethnicities, musicians, companies, teams, and whatever else becomes salient in our daily lives. What’s fascinating about this basic ‘us versus them’ instinct is how quickly, and irrationally, it activates. For a Portlander at a Timbers-Sounders game Kasey Keller should rationally be one of us. But instinctively he is one of them.

There are a couple fun examples of the automaticity of ‘us versus them’ thinking that might be familiar to anyone who has ever taken Psychology 101. The classic is Muzafer Sherif’s 1954 “Robbers Cave Experiment.” Sherif was a social psychologist at the University of Oklahoma who was interested in group behavior, and devised a classic experiment elegant for its simplicity. He basically just took a group of normal boys to summer camp at Robbers Cave State Park. The trick was that the boys were randomly assigned to two separate groups and isolated from each other—adopting group names “The Rattlers” and “The Eagles” (no relation, I presume, to the Screaming Eagles “standing up for DC” United). After an initial period of bonding, the boys learned of the other group, and the researchers began arranging for competitions on a ball field. There was almost immediate animosity; name calling, efforts to self-segregate, raids of group camps, and, in fine supporters group tradition, the exchange of derogatory songs. The researchers added a final phase where they created situations in which the groups had to work together, and suddenly everyone started to get along again. It was a simple study making a profound point: there was no difference between the two groups of boys until they became groups. Any of the “Rattlers” could just as easily have been “Eagles” in exactly the same way as, I suspect, many Manchester United supporters could just as easily have been for Arsenal or Liverpool with a few small twists of fate.

Another favorite example comes from several decades ago when an Iowa school teacher named Jane Elliot created a brilliant demonstration of the power of us versus them as a way to address racial discrimination with her elementary school students in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. One morning she simply told the students that they were going to do a little demonstration where they would be divided up for a few days by the color of their eyes. First the blue eyed kids got the privileges, while the brown eyed kids put on colored scarves marking their out-group status (and the next day it was reversed). By recess time that same morning the kids were brawling on the playground because us started mocking them for having brown eyes. In Jane Elliot’s words: “I watched what had been marvelous, cooperative, wonderful, thoughtful children turn into nasty, vicious, discriminating, little third-graders in a space of fifteen minutes.” Substitute “sports fans” for “children,” along with “ninety” for “fifty,” and the quote still works quite well.

Further, in the classroom situation, not only did simple and substantively meaningless group distinctions based on eye color create anger, the kids let their group membership shape their performance on school work—on a flash card task the same kids either excelled or flailed depending on whether their group was assigned superiority for the day. Our ‘us versus them’ instinct can make kids seem stupid, and I suspect it can also allow ostensibly intelligent and educated soccer fans to end up choking people with scarves.

A laboratory for groupness

It turns out that soccer and supporters groups are nearly perfect laboratories for stimulating ‘us versus them’ instincts. According to Judith Harris’s accessible, if controversial, summary of the scholarly research, some of the key ingredients for making group membership psychologically significant include:

Socially defined membership that necessitates more of an internal than external commitment, along with shared experiences and an emphasis on commonalities within the group (according to the Timbers Army web-site, to be a member “If you like your sports passionate instead of passive – if you’re proud of the Rose City — if you appreciate the Beautiful Game – YOU are Timbers Army. No membership, no initiation, no rules, no fuss. Just wander into the North End of PGE Park and join the fun!”)

Competition and an emphasis on points of contrast from other groups (when the European Football Weekends site waded into explaining the Sounders-Timbers rivalry across the pond, the comments were inundated with defensive comparisons from both sides: a relatively tame example from an anonymous Sounders fan, “you may wonder why Timbers fans are commenting on an article about the Sounders. They are a funny lot whose entire supporter culture revolves around jealousy of and irrevocable obsession with the Sounders. They rarely know the names of their own players, but they will mark their calendars months in advance for a match against us. If you spend time in person with a Timbers fan, you will hear more talk about the Sounders than their own team.”).

Proximity (it is no coincidence that many supporters groups mark themselves explicitly by the section of the stadium where they sit—the “The 107 Independent Supporters’ Trust is the machinery behind the Timbers Army” and is named after the stadium section where they sit during games, while the Sounders group Emerald City Supporters have their numerical sections (121-123) and their street (“Brougham Faithful”) featured on their logo.)

Group goals and/or a common enemy (at the Sounders-Timbers match at least one Vancouver Whitecapscorrection: San Jose Earthquakes supporter came to Portland bearing a sign with the message “The enemy of my enemy is my friend!”).

Photo by Bjørn Giesenbauer from flickr.com

Explicit markers of group identity (scarves are virtually ubiquitous across the soccer world because they are such an efficient marker of group identity—one of the Sounders’ marketing coups was to provide ‘free’ scarves to season ticket holders, automatically cementing a social identity while also bearing an eerie resemblance to the scarves Jane Elliot used to mark the “inferior” group in her classroom).

Implicit norms and expectations (some Sounders supporters groups, such as Gorilla FC, distinguish themselves by trying to explicitly avoid the stereotypes of “ultra” groups: “One more belief of Gorilla FC, besides the love of the party, is that this group will share the same spirit as the fans of FC ST. PAULI!! WE ARE ANTI-RACIST, ANTI-FACIST, ANTI-SEXIST, AND ANTI-HOMOPHOBIC, BUT PRO-PARTY!! It seems bizarre to have to post that, however we want to establish that our friends are dedicated to building a love of the Sounders free from ignorance. A thinking ethic! We also will be active in supporting various community organizations. Gorilla FC is more than just a supporters club!!”)

As that last example makes clear, creating a sense of ‘groupness’ is not necessarily a bad thing—however artificial, the social identities of sports fans have just as much potential to influence pro-social as anti-social norms. In fact, the Timbers’ 107ist Supporters Trust includes not just tifo and game travel but also charitable works among its ‘basic purposes.’ Likewise, when social marketing campaigns such as ‘Show Racism the Red Card’ work it is likely due largely to re-framing social identities—remaking the group identity to include ‘soccer fans fight [rather than endorse] racism.’

But what team rivalries and fan allegiances all over the world illustrate most of all is that the ‘us versus them’ instinct plays fast and easy on our minds. As much as FIFA folks like to spin platitudes about the game bringing people together, it can just as easily tear people apart. As much as the World Cup presents opportunities to display national identities, our local allegiances and teams (so often composed entirely of outsiders) display how contrived all our social identities can be. And, at the same time, how meaningful.

Indeed it was intended as a humorous offering Tom. There’s nothing more passionate and spontaneous about being a supporter of a club than analyzing the reasons why I love the Timbers and hate the flounders and laying those reasons out on a table like specimens in a laboratory.

#1 I was at the “do the Cobain” game, and it felt so shitty… i love my Timbers, and my Timbers Army boys and girls, and it felt really shitty.

#2 Cuts pretty sharp your words about many avid fans not knowing much about the teams they support. Being a soccer player myself (FC Portlandia!) i’ve loved getting to know how the players play over the last 2-3 seasons (#n3wbk8k3z). And there’s often this weird paradox between being *into* the chants and goings on in the stands, and *into* the game… for me at least.

#3 FC Portlandia (a Timbers supporters team) just played a friendly against a Sounders supporters team and it was great. Hopefully one of many of these “Eagles & Rattlers are the same kind of boys” incidents to come… Maybe we find some excuses to do some good stuff together before or after getting passionate in the bleachers.

#4 I can see how a ManU fan could become an Arsenal fan with a few simple twists of fate, but it’s unlikely anyone would become a Liverpool fan by choice.

Chase–just to clarify, the claim of fans not know much about their teams was actually a quote from someone else on a comment thread. I was using it to illustrate the tendency to emphasize contrasts and make irrational claims. One of the things I love about soccer fans and American soccer is that we do get more of a chance to know the players–they tend not to be distant superstars (minus the very occassional Beckham sighting), but regular people who show up. And the fact that we have a pretty vibrant internet fan culture means much knowledge is available. So as a general rule I think fans do tend to know their teams–which, in some ways, makes it all the more interesting that we don’t mind much where the players actually come from, and that we tend to insult ‘them’ for not being ‘real fans’ (which was the imagined argument of the quote I took off a comment thread).

Also really interesting to hear about supporters teams playing a ‘friendly’–as long as it stays friendly, that kind of stuff has great potential.

Supporters’ friendlies are indeed a good way to build some relationships and respect outside of the stands. Fire fans have done this against supporters from Toronto, LA and Denver in the past (maybe others I’m unaware of).

Good post. Very interesting read. I’ll bet the Keller/Cobain sign you use as an example made a lot of Timber’s supporters a bit queasy. Though of course I don’t think it was meant to be taken at all literally, and was more of a tactic to get Kasey off his game. But personally I think that guy deserves nothing but total respect.

Interestingly I was in Seattle visiting my sister, who lives there, several weeks after that game. I was in a pub in her neighborhood watching a US national team qualifier, and struck up a conversation with some Sounders fans. They were at the US Open cup game, and told us how much they enjoyed the atmosphere, and thought the tifo of Timber Jim cutting down the Space Needle with his chainsaw was brilliant. We ended up watching the rest of the national team game together — we were the only ones in the place remotely interested in it actually. When it was over and I was leaving I left them with a “fvck shittle” which they got a good laugh from, and then told me to hurry back to Portscum. I love that the rivalry is intense, and I think it’s good for the game and the MLS if it grows, but we all need to make sure we keep it in perspective.

I think the reaction to Kasey taking a job with the Sounders was because he had such close ties to Portland. There’s nothing more hated than a turncoat or a traiter. Mind you, I don’t think that Kasey is either of those. I hope that that sign was nothing more than a bad attempt at humor. I really don’t think anyone really wanted Kasey to commit suicide.

A funny story on that note. I was in Seattle to see the MLS finals and Kasey was at a bar signing autographs. When noone was waiting for him, I went up and told him I had watched him play back in the day at the U of P. We both laughed about both of us having more hair at the time. I then said that he should have waited to come back to the U.S. to play for the Timbers. He made a look that I interpreted (don’t know if it was the case or not) to mean “I wish I could have”, but said, “Shhhh, don’t let anyone here hear you say that.” Nice guy, class guy, and I hope the next sign that hangs when he comes to town to play gives him crap but in a funnier way.

Which brings up a point. Why can’t you have lively give and take between fans, a spirited rivalry, but do it with a sense of humor? The most fun I have with rival fans is when you can give them a hard time at the game and they chuckle and throw it back at you (at which time I chuckle).

I don’t mind putdowns of Portland, if they are witty and imaginative: Screw the Shiitle Flounders!

You’ve definately got a good central hypothesis here. I think Appadurai had a lot to say on these kind of issues too also about how people put ‘hard work’ into maintaining identities, whether its painting kerbstones and murals in Belfast or constructing a banner for a football match – it all involves people actively working to maintain distinctiveness; accentuating differences which often evaporate without such ritual. The use of colours in this is also an age old thing and finds its modern day equivalent in football scarves and then there’s my old lecturers work on tatooing about ‘anchoring the post-modern self’ – in other words tatooing is about fixing an identity in an age of reflexive identity and the tatoo is as much about the pain and hard work required in its initial after-care as the permanance. Often people get their club crest tatooed so to me it says something about people faced with reflexive postmodern identities anchoring their identity to their chosen club – often (though not exclusively local).

My team Southampton also has one of the most well documented rivalries in the game. The interesting thing is how much variance there is. The majority of fans pay lip-service to the chants and the ribbing which goes on between people from each city seeing it as something tounge-in-cheek but others take this to extremes with real hatred and some even to violence.

Many folks (if not most) from the Northwest have ties to both cities, which makes this rivalry even more interesting. Take myself–I grew up in Portland and went to many a Timbers match before moving up to Seattle for work. A few years past when I began to hear about Seattle founding an MLS club. As an avid fan of soccer, I was forced to choose either my hometown club and go to only an occasional MLS match in Seattle, or pick up season tickets and “shift” my allegiances. Now that the Timbers are entering the league, however, I’m just as inclined to support them too.

Can one be a supporter of both clubs and blaspheme? At this point I see myself as a soccer supporter and a supporter of the league in general. Similar to the Keller analogy posted above, many USMNT fans watched Donovan’s move to Everton this winter with interest, though they whistle with an increased intensity when he plays their MLS club as a member of the Galaxy.

The local paper here recently had a piece on the Southampton/Portsmouth rivalry which mentioned that it was in the past not uncommon for people to watch both teams, visiting the other city (no more than a 20-30 minute drive away) when their team was playing away. This is something that is almost unheard of now. I think – in line with my earlier post that it’s just about the ‘hard work’ put into maintaining the division, whether it’s the club attempting to build a core fanbase or fans themselves seeking an identity. Part of this process involves mythologising (In saints/Pompey case the mythologising goes back to dock strikes in the 19th century where Soutyhampton dockers were supposedly brought in to break a strike amongst Portsmouth Dockers – a story which there is some doubt over.) and as well as mythologising there is the creation of common heroes and villans. I think in general the process is one which can see rivalries harden and soften depending on a range of variables. I’ve just read Huckleberry Finn and it reminds me a bit of the feud between two families which no one knows how it started!

Very nice article. One thing I’m interested in as well is the degree to which this particular war of words is fueled by its underground nature. Not having top division teams the rivalry was unnoticed in the outside world and both cities (Portland to a larger extent) seem to embrace that. In fact I’d bet one of the reasons this region supports soccer so passionately is that it’s not a major sport still. Some of it is sorta absurd. TA has every reason to be very proud of what they’ve built, but they seem to imagine a history of animosity that is fairly new. After all, there were no Timbers until 2001.

Still, I’ll be rooting for Portland to make it through qualifying in Open Cup so we get our revenge for the charity pre-season loss. Championships are great, but beating Portland is better.

My bad. I wasn’t clear that I was referring to the fact that they didn’t have a team in the 90′s. I think most of us aren’t really riled up about what went on during the NASL days. To the outside observer it might seem that the rivalry has been there all along since the 70′s when obviously it hasn’t.

I can understand what you’re saying but the sports rivalry between the two cities is long and fierce (Blazers/Sonics, Winterhawks/T’Birds, Timbers/Sounders) and didn’t necessarily take a hiatus while top flight soccer in this country did. You are technically correct that the two clubs may not have played during those intervening years in their current guises, but longtime Timbers fans didn’t forget the Sounders and, in my experience, Sounders fans did not forget the Timbers.

I’m not saying that you should start carrying a torch for your club’s/city’s past…but I would be cautious about undervaluing its importance to people who have more of an eye towards history just because you don’t get riled up about it.

I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I just look at our respective supporter groups and most of us were barely schoolkids when NASL folded, if that. It wasn’t until 17 years later that two teams representing our cities met again. Certainly there are many who have been around through each incarnation of each side, but they aren’t large in number.

It’s one thing to respect our history, it’s quite another to build a contrived one. Realistically this is a great rivalry that is about a decade old and should continue to grow and set the example for the rest of the country. It’s not an American Old Firm.

While I think that the older generation of passionate fans rightly point to the history of the teams from the seventies, and that this history is an integral part of what makes the Cascadia Cup exciting today, a simple look at either the Timbers Army or the ECS will show that a significant number of us are too young for that earlier era to have a significant impact on how we internalize the rivalry. It’s not to say that us youth types don’t value the history, or that we don’t appreciate the sort of historical grudge between two rival communities, but that whatever beautiful thing is coming out of the Pacific Northwest in terms of passion for the beautiful game is in large part aided by the resurgence of interest from the under-30 crowd.

As a younger Timbers supporter who is from Portland (and I hate to admit this, but how many of us young people in Portland/Seattle can actually claim to be FROM the area? be honest), I can appreciate how chanting “Rose City ‘Til I Die” is fraught with meaning of civic identity, us vs them anomie, and related to a larger historical context; I just think that this next wave of younger soccer fans are adding a unique special something to this fandom other than just perpetuating and mimicking a historical precedence.

also, thanks to Andrew Guest for the great article, and using my photo. Rose City Til I Die!

I’ve always been bothered by what appears to me to be an overt and conscious decision on the part of a select few PNW soccer fans to create a rivalry because they thought it would be a good promotion for the sport. That may be true, but underlying all this is a lot of mythologizing and outright fabrications. The resulting emotions (or, in promoter-speak, “passion”) aren’t really based on anything substantial. Does this bother anyone else? It seems like a purposeful and conscious regression when for the most part we all really do know better.

As a relative newcomer to the Timbers Army, I can assure you all that there is nothing contrived about the Portland-Seattle rivalry. As Cap Ap pointed out earlier, our rivalry has also shown itself in the form of hockey, basketball, and even baseball (pre-Mariners, of course.) The soccer rivalry, I have found, is the most colorful and passionate of them all, simply due to the nature of the sport and the culture surrounding it.

Ironically, this rivalry has brought me closer to old friends of mine in Portland and Seattle. Many dear old friends from my youth have also a new found passion for soccer and have been in more regular contact lately. There is joking and ribbing, but it’s all in good fun. Every few months we may stand apart for 90 minutes, but the rest of the time we are closer than we have been in years.

There are always dooooooooshbag fans for every team. Violence and signs promoting violence are not things I consider acceptable behavior.

We are not the Old Firm… We are not the Superclassico… We are not Merseyside… We are Portland and Seattle, the Timbers and Sounders, the best damn soccer rivalry in America.

Flounder fans… As much as you hate us, you need us… We complete you… Let our recent victory in your little charity event serve notice for this year in USOC and next year in MLS.

Very well done Andrew. This is something that I (and I’m sure a lot of others) have been grappling with for a long time and I appreciate how well you broke the phenomenon down. I’d venture to say that in Tunisia (where I was born) the situation is even worse as there are political implications to what region of the country you’re from. Such a small country in comparison to the US but 10 million people divide across these “artificial” lines in disturbing fashion and will often boo players from teams they don’t like even when they’re wearing a national team jersey. I’m all for passionate fans but it sucks when the love for a club ends up trumping love for a country or a country’s national team. Hope we can overcome it somehow one day…

[...] and also by Portland based soccer writer Andrew Guest, is an interesting analysis of fan culture: A Mental Game: Us versus Them and the Social Psychology of Fandom. The Portland rivalry with a club up north features [...]

[...] Them and the Social Psychology of Fandom Posted in Uncategorized by mikj on 1 April 2010 A Mental Game: Us versus Them and the Social Psychology of Fandom Why, with intense and organic feelings of affiliation to our teams, does it so rarely seem to [...]

Interesting article, definitely a good read from a perspective that is not the usual one.

One detail though: You wrote about how some Timbers supporters put up the “Keller do the Cobain” banner despite Keller has strong ties to Portland and the Timbers. You miss the mark there completely. They put up that banner BECAUSE Keller has these strong ties. Going to the rival team is the ultimate sin in supporter culture.

I’d suggest that there are differences in the way fans behave at and away from the ground. We all enjoy a good sing-a-long of “you’re not singing anymore” or “is there a fire drill?” when the opposing fans flood out of the arena, but the same folks we’ll taunt from across the terraces will be happily accompanied for a drink and indulged with in banter back in normal life. OK, there are extreme rivalries including that between Celtic and Rangers in Scotland but only complete meatheads would maintain strong antagonism away from the football watching experience. England fans the length and breadth of the country will have been booing John Terry in recent weeks, but all will be cheering him in South Africa in June. Much of the posturing in stadia is pure pantomime.

i was one of the people that made the cobain banner. if it wasn’t this banner, you would bring up the “real fans hate levesque” banner that was held while roger was playing in a timbers kit. If it wasn’t over the top stuff like this, Mr. Guest would not have a “rivalry” and more fierce than NYRB vs KCWizzz. Rivalries are about irrational over-the-top reactions. It is a banner FFS. It was to get into his head during the match. It failed, but it got into yours.

Thanks all for the continued interesting comments. It’s good to hear some insight into people’s specific experiences with and perspectives on the Timbers/Sounders stuff, but also good to see mentions of how some of the same principles are at work in places as diverse as Southampton/Portsmouth and Tunisia.

Because the point was that while the Timbers/Sounders provide some examples that are fun to unpack, the phenomenon is broader than that. I’d suggest all rivalries anywhere in the world have some things that are truly local and unique, while simultaneously having somethings that are universal and shared. For me the balance between those is what makes the culture of the game so great. I was trying to explore one piece of that in this article just to offer some perspective–but I agree with some of the comments suggesting other factors are involved as well (the identity investment, the ‘pantomime’ that is always part of human behavior, etc.).

And to any fans who might feel judged by my analysis, I’ll just re-emphasize something I wrote in the piece: “the edginess and intensity of passionate fan allegiance is often a crucial element of what makes a great match so much fun for everyone involved.” I do tend to think there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed, but I also value how the hardcores create glorious emotion around the game that touches even those of us who over-rely on intellectualization as a defense mechanism. It’s all appreciated.